I went into my favorite used bookstore recently, and I was shocked to find only a handful of Michael Crichton’s old books on hand. When I was a kid, he was ubiquitous. He was guaranteed to have not just an entire shelf dedicated to his work, but often an entire case.
I mean, dozens of movies have been made out of his books, and that’s before I even need to mention his two most enduring franchises: Jurassic Park and Westworld. The guy was clearly a genius.
My early introduction to Crichton was when I was twelve and I read his first big hit, The Andromeda Strain. I would argue that this one book created the entire techno-thriller genre more than a decade before Tom Clancy took over the pop-novel world. The Andromeda Strain is packed with all things nerd: aliens (in the form of a lethal micro-organism that turns human blood to sludge and eats radiation for breakfast), lasers, supercomputers, a high-tech underground lab, and a nuclear bomb set to blow up in T-minus-Holy-Shit minutes.
The copy I read was an early edition with a cover by Paul Bacon. The cover depicts what appears to be the outline of a petri dish containing two colonies of microscopic life, but with all the shapes described by computer-generated digits. To top it all off, the image is superimposed over an image of planet Earth, looking very small and vulnerable as the Andromeda strain begins to literally invade it.
A simple design, but one that perfectly evokes the book’s theme of technology-plus-biology-equals-disaster. (The organism, as is revealed in the plot, was harvested by a top-secret military program to find extraterrestrial extremophiles for bio-warfare.)
You can read a great tribute to Paul Bacon here.
Ash Clifton, Writer 